I’m in my late 20s and I might have finally found something worth writing about. Or maybe a more correct term would be is I finally found a thinking prism that I think is worth sharing. Naive thinking. But wait. Isn’t the whole meaning of thinking to avoid naivety? Aren’t the greatest minds great because they avoid naive biases and naive arguments? Well, are they?
In the general sense, a naive person is someone gullible, innocent, inexperienced. The kind of person who would believe you immediately if you told them the scar you have is the result of a knife fight and not you smashing into a glass door when you didn’t fully grasp the concept of transparency.
It is a particular part of that naive person that I think is worth entertaining, that particular part that allows the naive person to hold a more preposterous idea than their jaded friend. And jaded thought is in our case the opposite of naive.
When you think about something your default perspective is jaded. Jaded by what’s plausible, jaded by what’s possible, jaded by what’s taboo or by what’s trendy. Our default is to be the jaded friend to our naive thought. Generally that’s a good thing. Generally believing things that disagree too much with reality is a sure way to find yourself wearing a tinfoil hat. However only thinking thoughts that agree with reality is sure way to make that reality not of your own making.
Great thinking is done not by avoiding the naive, but by embracing it enough to go through the jaded default view. The optimal amount of believing the unbelievable is not 0.